The latter, obviously. The Seventies couldn't have carried that off without slathering the floor in brown shag. I was just there - on Bastille Day, which was completely ignored in the massive CDG terminal - and found the Paris airport an interesting comparison with our own MSP. Much more stylish, with unified colors and themes; remarkable bathrooms. But far fewer choices for eating. Granted, the food was good; you'd expect that. But in terms of selection, it reminded you of the days when MSP was run by HOST, and HOST only. Granted, I was only in two terminals, and I think there were 146 others, so don't listen to me.

In other travel-related news: The Costa Concordia is rising from its (checking maritime cliches list. . . ) watery grave today, and Giz has a livestream. At the moment I’m writing this, it seems to be a board meeting of unhappy EU technocrats, but that could change.

I was just on a cruise ship a few days ago, and was reminded that one activity approximates the panic and tumult of a sinking, and that’s the Midnight Chocolate Buffet. When you remove the “eating lots of desserts” part and insert “fear for life” it becomes really chaotic, but not by much.

Related, only because I just had a long flight that began with sitting in an unairconditioned plane for an hour breathing the same air until everyone was light-headed and beginning to hallucinate - seriously, at one point we all imagined that the flight attendant cracked the mike and told us what was going on, which never happens; they just apologize for the delay when you finally push back, and you hope they weren’t doing something like “Fixing the Engine, Which was Broke” because you really don’t want to think you’re going over the ocean on a plane that got patched up with duct tape and chewing gum by guys who shrugged and said “well, it ought to hold” - anyway, Seven Activities for Long Flights. It’s Clickhole, so it’s not real. Also, it’s not very funny, so never mind.

It’s remarkable how we get bored and dissatisfied with miracles: whereas once we were agog at a TV SCREEN! in the CHAIR! where you could watch MOVIES! now you’re dismayed if it has the resolution of 2002 ATM screen.

When any sizable online service disappears, a piece of our civilization's cultural fabric goes with it. In this case, the missing cultural repository is Prodigy, a consumer-oriented online service that launched in 1988 as a partnership between Sears and IBM . . .

Over its 11-year lifespan, a generation of Americans grew up with Prodigy as part of their shared cultural heritage. In an earlier era, we may have spoken about another common cultural experience—say, Buster Keaton films—as a cultural frame of reference for an entire generation. Everybody saw them, everybody referenced them. And while Prodigy was nowhere near as popular as Buster Keaton among the general public, hundreds of thousands of people with a computer and a modem in the early 1990s tried Prodigy at least once.

The Keaton-Prodigy ratio was probably about 1,000,000 to 1, but I see their point.

MOVIES On the plane I watched “Abe Lincoln, Vampire Hunter” - ridiculous and fun. Turns out the Civil War was also about vampires. But this New York Times piece from last week notes something else that may have (checking martial imagery cliche list . . . ) turned the tide of war: java.

Did the fact that Union troops were near jittery from coffee, while rebels survived on impotent brown water, have an impact on the outcome of the conflict? Union soldiers certainly thought so.

Bonus points for not using “The Secret History of Coffee and the Civil War” in the headline. And now if you'll excuse me, Jet lag is about to kick zzzzzzzzzzz WHA?!? Sorry. Never mind. Dozed off.